Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

travdaddy writes "As reported on Slashdot only about a week ago, a passage of a gambling bill in Massachusetts would have criminalized online poker. That passage has been stricken due to the help of a grass-roots organization called the Poker Players Alliance. It 'quickly got the message to all of its Massachusetts members — around 25,000 people — and over 1,000,000 nationwide to make their voices heard; apparently lawmakers were listening since the language making online poker illegal — and online gaming in general — was taken out of the legislation.' Another Massachusetts bill may even 'take [poker] completely out of the gambling genre' and make it legislated as a game of skill."

After watching Phil Ivey burn out at the WSOP last year... I'd say it's both. It's about making the right decision based on what you know, and what ou have. You can't last long in tournament play if you're a sloppy player, and on the reverse, no matter how good you are, if you're drawing crap hands, even if you muscle in with crap cards, it's going to destroy you.

It's also certainly gambling, but it's not the same as blackjack or slots which is entirely a you vs the house, it is a you versus everyone else(the house gets a small cut) situation.

After watching Phil Ivey burn out at the WSOP last year... I'd say it's both. It's about making the right decision based on what you know, and what ou have. You can't last long in tournament play if you're a sloppy player, and on the reverse, no matter how good you are, if you're drawing crap hands, even if you muscle in with crap cards, it's going to destroy you.

First, tournament poker is only one form of the game and involves higher variance compared to a cash game. But while the outcome of any individual hand or of a single tournament is a combination of luck and skill, long-run outcomes can only differ among individuals on the basis of skill, since the random factors do not favor any particular individual in the long run.

Whether poker is a game of skill or a game of luck depends on the number of hands played. Of course luck has an effect on any individual hand or for that matter on an individual tournament, and a skillful player can have a bad day or a bad month. Over a large enough number of hands though, the good hands and bad hands will be distributed evenly between all players. Therefore, the difference between a successful player and an unsuccessful player is a difference in skill, not a difference in luck. To me, that

Right. It's part of what makes the game so much fun. In chess if an expert played a noob he would probably crush him every game, but with poker the noob always has a chance.
The game teaches you a lot about your own psychology too, since if you are a winning player you will likely eventually hit a downswing that you thought was impossible before.

All poker involves both skill and luck, this is a consequence of a game with unknown and dynamic starting variables. However, this doesn't make it any less a game of skill, it just increases variance. This is partly why poker is so popular... anyone can win on a given day and think he's a poker genius. It's especially true for tournaments where the skill edge of the participants is greatly reduced since the stacksizes are small. there is a fear of busting out and there are so many players changing tables (n

"For instance, you might see a player 3-bet all his aces better than AT from the BTN against a CO raise deep stacked but calls with Axs etc.. Then, when he 3-bets you and an A flops, you know that he doesn't have it."

Sorry if I'm being dense here, but the way I read this the player 3-bets A[J-K] and merely calls A[T-2]. So, when he 3-bets and an A lands, how would you know he doesn't have an A when we know he could have A[J-K]?

Considering that the biggest gripe of the WSP old-hands is that young players are ruining the game by relying too much on aggressive betting, I would like to argue that it is not nearly as much a game of skill as a lot of people think.

Yes, there's a big gap between someone who doesn't what they're doing and someone who knows the odds, the optimal bet associated with the odds and when someone's bluffing. At the same time, once you get to a certain level, it boils down to whether you get the cards you need. If you don't, you will lose - regardless of how awesome your strategy, card-counting and face-reading is.

So, yes, there's skill in Poker. But you can still do nothing but lose just because you're getting crap cards - or win just because you keep getting awesome cards.

Thats heads-up live action, and its true that some poker has low variance.

The GP was correct that the old guard of pro tournament players do not like the new situation, and it isnt because they dont have an edge against the young hyper-aggressive crowd.

Its because the hyper aggressive players increase the variance of everyone at the table, including the loose passive players, which is pecisely counter to what benefits the top half of the table (including the *good* hyper-aggressives) the most.

That's not live.. its online (duh?). And heads up has the MOST variance. Please stop giving anecdotal evidence.. its so dumb that its making my head hurt. Variance can be calculated using solid mathematical methods. The confidence levels of having a certain BB/100 can be calculated too. And so on. There's no need to tell stupid retarded lame stories.

And yet all you provided was anecdotal evidence. Food for thought: if 1000 people make 1000 dice rolls, what are the odds that one person has an average dice roll of 4?

By my calculations, the chances of any given 1000 rolls having that result would be 2.15 * 10^-22. If 1000 people rolled, that makes 2.15 * 10^-19. To put it into perspective, every person on Earth would have to do 3.8 trillion attempts of the 1000-roll experiment to see an average of 4 once. That's close enough to zero for me.

Preemptive correction: that 3.8 trillion attempts by each person in the world would only make for a 50% chance of one of those experiments resulting in an average of 4. Also, I used an estimate of 6 billion people for the population. That's probably low, but it doesn't change the numbers substantially.

Heads up does not have the most variance. You just made that up. Maybe specific players do, but thats a different story.

This fact is quite obvious. A 10-handed $20/$40 game verses a 2-handed $20/$40 games. In both cases it costs about the same to see a hand through, but in the 10 handed game your chance of winning any given hand is less, but the payoff odds are higher. Thats the fucking definition of variance.

Considering that the biggest gripe of the WSP old-hands is that young players are ruining the game by relying too much on aggressive betting, I would like to argue that it is not nearly as much a game of skill as a lot of people think.

Tournament play is heavily influenced by luck. One bad beat and you're out. End of story.

Cash play, however, is a game of skill. A skilled player brushes off a bad beat, waits out the cold cards, and makes money in the long run. The overly aggressive risk-taker who just won a tournament will lose every penny of his winnings, and then some, if he chooses to sit down at a cash table and see how his playing style works for him in the long run.

ONE tournament play is heavily influenced by luck. No doubt about that. But a serious, skilled poker player isn't only going to enter one tournament in their lifetime, he's going to enter LOTS and LOTS of tournaments. So a skilled played can still brush off one bad tournament beat just like you said, and still make money in the long run. In many tournaments, if you literally play 100 times and only take first place once you'd still make a boatload of cash overall.

Considering that the biggest gripe of the WSP old-hands is that young players are ruining the game by relying too much on aggressive betting, I would like to argue that it is not nearly as much a game of skill as a lot of people think.

Tournament play is heavily influenced by luck. One bad beat and you're out. End of story.

Cash play, however, is a game of skill. A skilled player brushes off a bad beat, waits out the cold cards, and makes money in the long run. The overly aggressive risk-taker who just won a tournament will lose every penny of his winnings, and then some, if he chooses to sit down at a cash table and see how his playing style works for him in the long run.

You should really stop responding to peoples posts because its pretty clear that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
Luck is going to influence just about any game over a small sample size, thats why you have upsets in sports. However when you have a statistically relevant sample (in online poker this would be ~100k hands)you can fairly easily deduce who the skilled players are.
I've been playing as my sole means of income since 2007, and have played well over a million poker hands(I p

Not really. The problem is, in a tournament, you have limited options. In a cash game, an agressive player will eventually start losing and if you have enough cash, you can be there to get all your money back.

In a tournament, though, once your chips are gone, you're out. And even if you're a 95% favorite on every hand you play, if you are playing for all your chips (which frequently happens when you're up against agressive players), you will eventually get busted by a bad beat (all too often "eventually"

Pre-flop, you'd be correct. Post flop not so much. He could have hit a set on on the flop. If his pocket was suited, theres flushes, and always straight draws. Odds for those three get even better after the turn if your still sitting there on aces. There are times where throwing aces away is the correct move.

There are very few times when throwing aces away is the correct move, and if someone has been playing over-aggressively, the chance that it's one of those times hasn't changed, so your chance of doubling-up on your measly bullets goes WAY THE FUCK UP.

Wrong. If you're heads up, pocket A's are a huge advantage against any other hand, but if there is more than one player you're up against, the value of aa's goes way down. And when playing against a large field of agressive players, it's very common to be all in against 2 or 3 or even 4 people. Your aces are at a less than 50% chance of winning, even though you've got the best hand.

Still, even heads up you have to decide if you're willing to put your tournament life at stake against someone that can get

Know how I know YOU are bad at poker? You don't understand what I am talking about.

If you get dealt pocket aa's 100 times in a row, and each time you go up against someone that has you covered, your tournament *WILL* be over.

Not if you have a stack that is 99x bigger than everyone because you won the first 99 of those 100 hands. I love people like you who fold AA, you pay my mortgage. The ONLY time where folding AA preflop would be correct is in a satellite tournament where every place pays the same amount and you have enough chips to be able to fold into the money. In any other situation folding AA preflop, covered or not is a huge mistake. cEV == $EV in almost every case and if you have folding when you have a HUGE edge v

We're talking about the WSOP here, not a bunch of randon sng's where you can average your losses (and wins) out over as many games as you feel like playing. With sng's, it doesn't matter if you lose one, because you will win more than you lose, but that's not how a big tourney works.

We're talking about winning "the big one". It's not just the money, but the prestige of winning the main event. If you treat it just like a random sng, you won't even make the bubble, bec

We're talking about the WSOP here, not a bunch of randon sng's where you can average your losses (and wins) out over as many games as you feel like playing. With sng's, it doesn't matter if you lose one, because you will win more than you lose, but that's not how a big tourney works.

You were talking about the WSOP? You post talked about "in a tournament" and "Tournament play", not "In the WSOP main event". You were making general statements about tournament poker, not specific statements about the WSOP.

I wasn't talking about SnGs in my post, ICM is every bit as important in a large tournament, although the effects aren't usually seen until the final table unless it is a satellite.

I'll agree that in a major tournament if you think you have a significant skill edge on the field you sho

But you can still do nothing but lose just because you're getting crap cards - or win just because you keep getting awesome cards.

You can also lose because you think your opponent has better cards than you/makes bets that are unprofitable to pay off, and win because you make your opponent think you have the best hand/make bets that are unprofitable for him/her to pay off.

That is where skill comes in. If you just deal out the hands and ignore what happens during the hand (i.e. dealing out the entire hand), s

Considering that the biggest gripe of the WSP old-hands is that young players are ruining the game by relying too much on aggressive betting, I would like to argue that it is not nearly as much a game of skill as a lot of people think.

Are you trying to say that the people who make the old-hands fold their chips away are less skilled than the them? The game is played differently today than it was in the 70s, and now it's all about balancing bluffs with thin value, weighting the opponents' hand ranges and optimizing bet sizes. The old school players you are talking about play a very narrow range of hands, their betting patterns are robotic and they only take the top of their range to showdown. All this makes it very easy to play against th

I mean, seriously, a game of skill is a game where if your skill is superior to your opponent's you win, period. In poker if the deck keeps spitting out cards that favor your opponent you can have all the skill in the world, and you will lose...

Yes, there is luck involved. There is also skill involved. That's a way to tell the good players from the lucky players. Over a long period of time, the good players win repeatedly. The lucky players win once in a while. The chance involved makes it more entertaining.

Yet strangely grandmaster chess games are often like 3-2, and not always 5-0. I guess chess isn't a game of skill then. Hmm.

obligatory: I'm not saying that the apparent chance element of chess is in any meaningful way the "same" as the intrinsic chance element of poker, but it does seem hard to define legislatively. Certainly your definition would exclude (almost?) all interesting games.

I mean, there are even people who manage to gain statistical edge in rock-paper-scissors tournaments. Apparently anytime there are 2+ people in symmetric situation, who both want something, a skill pops up.

Too much personification is misleading, and by grammar nazi rule, nicht erlaubt.

Yes, there exist a probability that your opponent will receive repeated winning hands, but that is just probability. In a general sense, games of pure probability are not games of skill. The skill in poker lies in the ability to read people's playing tactics over a period of time, recognize biological cues and behavioral patterns to 'read' their hand, 'read' their non-verbal signals, and manipulate the table with a high degree of personal physiological control.

Poker is a social game, and theirin lies the root of the skill. The probability involved in poker is just the medium for influencing the social dynamics that constitute the 'skill' portion of the game.

There's more to poker than "reading", it has multiple levels of skills.

If two people are playing and neither of them knows how to play at all it'll be pure chance, whomever gets the best cards will win.

If one of them know some pretty simple probability (either book knowledge or just from experience of seeing what happens), they'll have an edge.

If one knows basic probability, and the other knows conditional probability they'll have an edge.

If one knows conditional probability but the other also knows game theory, they'll have an edge.

Then there's the reading you mention, which operated in parallel. Though I would argue that simple things like observing (and remembering) betting patterns are significantly more useful than observing biological cues.

Not being an avid poker player, those views are very insightful to the uninformed. But what you have stated enforces the point that poker cannot always be reduced to pure probability, as many anti-pokerites would have us believe.

Using your logic, a fair amount of games could be reduced to almost pure probability with the condition that the player(s) have no skill whatsoever, and not deterministic cognitive abilities.

I agree. Biological cues are the things people like to point to in movies. When a player is sitting there staring down another player he is going over every hand that other player has played. Being able to take lots of imprecise information and do pattern recognition is one place where the skilled human brain is still often better than a computer.

He who wins the most money is the winner. It has a really simple score keeping system, with clear winners and losers

Of course the most skilled player doesn't always win - there is a large element of chance. So determining who won is not the same as determining who is most skilled. However, because there's a large amount of luck (and it is a large amount, I'm certainly not claiming the best player always wins) doesn't mean there is no skill at all.

Case in point: at the club that I used to play at, there was a player who showed up somewhat frequently who tended to clean up every table he sat at, even though he rarely even bothered to look to see what cards he had been dealt.

He was adept at quickly identifying the skill level of every player at the table, and playing to their weaknesses. Only if a skilled player was betting against him, or the betting started to get fierce enough that it became obvious that the cards were becoming a factor, would he ac

In any game or sport there are elements of luck. Take Scrabble for example. I doubt many would deny that Scrabble is a game skill. Yet there's a huge amount of luck involved in which letters you choose, and when you get them.

Granted, luck plays a large factor in a single hand of poker. However, poker is not a game of individual hands. The better players will be distinguished from the less skillful in the long run; hundreds of thousands of hands.

I mean, seriously, a game of skill is a game where if your skill is superior to your opponent's you win, period. In poker if the deck keeps spitting out cards that favor your opponent you can have all the skill in the world, and you will lose...

You're thinking short term. Skill pays off in the long run.

It's statistically impossible for the cards to always favour your opponent. Eventually, you will be dealt a better hand than your opponent's hand.

A simple way to look at it is this. In an infinite number of hands dealt randomly to two players, Player A will be dealt the better hand 50% of the time, and Player B will be dealt the better hand 50% of the time. If A is "perfectly" skilled and B is "perfectly" unskilled, then A will ensure that he wins the maximum amount of money on the hands that he wins, and loses the least amount of money on the hands that he loses. Additionally, when both players have "iffy" hands, A will play in such a way as to convince B that B's hand is inferior, even when it's not, so that B will fold and give the pot to A.

Over the long run, A will make more money, even though he isn't dealt more winning hands, and even though there will be periods of time when B is being dealt a sequence of winning hands.

Of course, this only really applies to cash play, as tournaments have a designated end, and therefore they are much more influenced by luck.

To anyone browsing this thread who believes that poker is at its core a game of chance, Rary has just provided a very nice complete & concise explanation of how skill enters the game of poker. Read it as many times as you need to, and ignore any other posts on that topic. Does anyone know if there's a visual aid describing this anywhere on the 'net? That's the one thing that could enhance this post.

The trick is identifying who is skilled and who is lucky. No one has enough time to play an infinite amount of times. As a result, skill has to be identified over a limited amount of hands.

Also, Rary merely provided an explanation that poker has an element of skill - but not how much of a person's winnings is attributable to skill, and how much is to luck. That's the crux of the problem.

Last time I seriously played I was in Phoenix. It only took about 2-3 trips around the table to recognize the only other good player at the table and from then on we just stayed out of each others way. I made quite a bit of money that night.

Everyone will have hot or cold runs over thousands of hands of poker - those matter only in the short term. The point is this: a strong player will lose less money with a losing hand (generally by folding earlier and not chasing expensive draws), extract more value from a winning hand (by keeping other players in the hand), and occasionally converting a losing hand to a winning hand (bluffing). Those factors have nothing to do with luck - luck only affects the cards, not the actions a player chooses to ta

I am a poker player. I do believe poker to be a skill game. But the reason why poker is not a complete skill game is because of the rake. Being consistently more skilled than your opponents at poker is not enough to make you profitable. You have to be skilled enough to also overcome the rake.

Let's say that in an ideal world, with no rake, I am skilled enough to win 5 dollars per hour. After introducing the rake, I could potentially lose 10

Of course the rake is capped. If it weren't, nobody would play. Because the rake would be unbeatable by even the most skilled of players. Any rake is intended to maximize the house's profit while still keeping good and bad players interested in playing.

The situation you describe is a rare one. For every hand where the "rake doesn't matter", there are probably 10 or 20 hands where the rake DOES matter. Hands where you paid an ante to simply fold. Hands

Because the rake would be unbeatable by even the most skilled of players.

Are you saying that the most skilled players have less than a 10% (pre-rake) ROI? Because I can assure you that is not the case. Even in today's post-boom tough games the skilled players can easily see 20-30% ROI post-rake on Sit and Go tournaments, which are raked at 10%.

So only boring as shit activities count as games of skill to you then? No point doing them if one player is always going to win.

Basketball, baseball, football, cricket, tennis, golf, darts, chess, wrestling, boxing, go, bridge, poker, backgammon, street fighter 2, modern warfare 2, counter strike, and so and so on. None of these are games of skill? After all it's uncommon for baseball series to be won 4-0, etc. Extremely unlikely for a pitcher to get a strike every pitch or a batter to get a hit every pitch

If your car is running like crap in Formula One all the skill in the world wont help you.

Checkout the mathematics of poker and look closely and you'll see skill is involved. Particularly games such as No-Limit Hold'Em and Pot-Limit Omaha. Those are extremely hard to solve problems. You'll see the combinatorics can be used effectively during games to assist with decision making, in what can be an extremely information sparse environment, and statistics can be used to track play over long periods with large s

Duke won the NCAA men's basketball championship, but they were clearly not the most talented team. Even in games of skill, there is luck involved. Does the ball bounce your way? Do you get an easy tournament draw? Heck, how do you feel that day? What about single game upsets? Those games where the favored team is clearly better and has more skill yet the other team 'got lucky.' Do those individual games suddenly become luck while the others are skill?

The nature of poker is that it's impossible to create a system that can always win, at least practically. Ultimately it relies on gut feelings, or just whims. This makes me wonder what really goes through the mind of a poker player who's pondering the next move. Most of the time they are not playing a game of skill, but a game of deception, that's why they say things like "You don't play the cards, you play the players".

Deception is skill. Playing the player is every bit as important as playing the "cards". This is true of nearly any sport/game. Two boxers may be physically identical with the same reaction times, strength, speed, technique, etc etc. But if one guy can make the other step in the wrong place (playing the player) then that "light" jab will put them right out.

But in poker deception has a dominant effect. People admire players who can pretend to play in certain way regardless of the cards they have. This is psychological warfare, and nobody is counting the cards.

Poker is a game of incomplete information. You use the information that you do have to draw conclusions and then you make bets based on those conclusions.
Good poker players tend to think about poker hands in terms of hand ranges. A hand range is every poker hand that an opponent will take a certain action with. Ideally you'd like to narrow your opponents range down to a single hand because you can then play perfectly against him (it would be very easy to play perfectly against someone who showed you th

That's largely a myth. The mathematics of playing poker usually involves making simple calculations of pot odds or making rough estimates of the probability of your hand being a winner or your opponents folding to a bet or raise. You can be an excellent poker player with no explicit awareness of the mathematics that are the basis of your actions. The key traits common to most great poker players are situational awareness and pattern recognition.

The math you need to know is basic probability. I would say it's more important to have a good memory. When you end up in a showdown with another player can you remember all the other players previous hands and build a mental model off that to what they may do/might have?

You mentioned earlier that people admire players who play a certain way. Few players play that same way all the time. The most skilled players can switch styles mid game and adjust to the table. It's the switching styles that makes it

There are different types of players with different skill sets. If you're Chris Ferguson [wikipedia.org], you play a mathematical game. If you're Scotty Nguyen [wikipedia.org], you play a psychological game. If you're me [wikipedia.org], you make lots of mistakes and hope to get lucky once in a while.:)

The nature of poker is that it's impossible to create a system that can always win, at least practically. Ultimately it relies on gut feelings, or just whims. This makes me wonder what really goes through the mind of a poker player who's pondering the next move.

Of course it's impossible to create a system that will always win. That would be stupid - the bad players have to be able to win occasionally, or else they won't come back.

I can't tell you want goes through anyone else's mind, but I can tell you some of the things I consider when I'm deciding what my next action will be.

What is my opponent likely to have? (Skill: Logic, memory, and observation of prior action)

How does my hand stand up against the weighted range of hands he is likely to have? (Skill: mathem

Remember when Greece outlawed "gaming" devices, so everybody with a built-in Tetris clone in their cellphone was automatically a criminal smuggling illegal goods? This is betting, wagering, or gambling, which is a subset of gaming in general.

I came from a chess background but I'm also a hobby poker player. The government has no right to decide what I do with my own money. I consider restrictions on online poker a huge invasion of my privacy. Moreover, it's also quite hypocritical given that states support lotteries, horseracing and other gambling operations. The only reason poker is sometimes singled out is because casinos want a monopoly on the market and states want to tax poker income and operators but have not come up with a good system yet

There is a luck and a skill side to poker. The luck side keeps the bad players in with their occasional wins, thinking they are good at poker or are overall winners, while the skill side wins money in the long run. The effect of having good or bad cards dealt is described as variance, if you look at a winning poker players profit/loss graph it will be a bumpy road upwards. The individual bumps are short term variance, the overall trend reflects the skill of the player.

Yeah, I thought online poker would appeal more to the Slashdot crowd too. The main poker site is the Two Plus Two forums [twoplustwo.com], and there's a lot of good strategy advice to be found amongst a fair amount of childish rants.

I play micro-stakes cash games. Last night I played 1000 hands and lost six buy-ins, but I think I played reasonably well nonetheless. Statistics backs me up as I turned a small profit according to "all-in expected value" (a calculation that removes the luck factor from hands where all the ch

Poker should definitely not be banned online. I could never understand why they would ban something online but if you drive to the local casino you can enjoy that "illegal" activity and not get in trouble. Poker should definitely be considered a skill game because everyone can see by watching The World Series on ESPN that there is tons of skill Involved. Don't get me wrong, even the most skilled poker player can run into bad luck and the donky's will get their small wins here and there, but overall, it take